#B 24 bomber crew listings tv#

#B 24 bomber crew listings tv#

Working on everything from commercials, feature films and TV series, he was doing jobs as varied as grip/electric, script supervisor, art department, boom operator to assistant director. He grew older, but never lost his admiration for his father and his father’s generation.Īfter finishing school, Alex moved to Dallas, went to college at UT-Arlington and started working in the film industry. They tend to embrace it and so they’ll talk about it,” explains Alex.Īlex heard his father’s stories and he read the histories of the battles and went to the airshows. “In each of those wars, he’d gone into harm’s way and the guys he was around were the same way. But then, he was career military and had also flown in Korea and Vietnam.

Unlike a lot of guys who’d been in combat, Nemesio Mena had never had much problem talking about what he’d been through. It wasn’t until much later that Alex would learn that they had been the first crew in their unit, the 492nd Bombardment Group, to complete a thirty mission combat tour. He learned that his father had been a radioman aboard a B-24 Liberator named The Irishman’s Shanty and that they had flown some very hairy missions over France and Germany during the summer of 1944. His father’s obvious pride in his bomber showed through, even though he had probably last flown on a B-24 at least 30 years earlier. ‘Heck no! I didn’t fly a B-17, I flew a LIBERATOR, the B-24’ Mena chuckles, remembering the encounter.

He rushed to his Dad and said so, but his father quickly set him straight. One day at a family get together, one of his cousins came up to him and exclaimed, ‘I didn’t know you’re Dad flew a B-17, that’s cool’. Nemesio Mena in his flight jacket, 1944 (image via Alex Mena)Īlex knew his dad, Nemesio Mena, had served in the war. Alex Mena fell firmly into the latter category. When it came to interest in the war, kids of Alex’s generation tended to fall into two categories: those who couldn’t stand the subject and those who couldn’t get enough of it. Even through it had happened twenty years before he’d been born, reminders of it were everywhere, in books, magazines, movies and TV shows. Like a lot of kids who came of age in the decades following World War II, Alejandro “Alex” Mena grew up in that war’s shadow. Here is a look inside the WWII documentary film, CREW 713. We have here a terrific article written by Brendan McNally about a documentary film currently in production concerning a specific WWII bomber crew: Crew 713, the men who flew the B-24 Liberator known as Irishman’s Shanty. Warbirds News, while often focused on the current state of vintage military aircraft, is also keen to share stories concerning the people involved with those aircraft whether in the present, or the past. Irishman’s Shanty’s first mission, May 11th, 1944.